IBM and Sony unveil Cell processor, workstation details

IBM has taken the wraps off the Cell processor, which will be the heart of …

Earlier this week, IBM fired a shot across the bow of Microsoft with the announcement of Lotus Workspace, an enterprise-class alternative to Microsoft Office. Today Sony joined them in challenging Microsoft with the unveiling of the Cell microprocessor architecture. Anticipated to to be the CPU powering the PlayStation 3, the Cell processor is under development by a partnership of IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. We originally covered it when rumors hit the street back in August 2002. From Hannibal's write-up:

So the way that the Cell processor works is that there is a pool of 16 or so of these (probably not completely identical) RISC or SIMD/VLIW cores on a single die. The system will do its processing by drawing resources from this pool on a task-specific basis. For instance, the audio processing subsystem will consist of a set of software routines that request cycles from the pool for the purpose of processing 3D audio. The 3D engine will similarly request cycles from the same pool for rendering, and similarly with the game AI system, etc. The different processing cores will probably be grouped together dynamically by software into "teams" in order to complete specific tasks (i.e. 3D rendering, audio, etc.). Each team's size will scale dynamically to fit its current workload by either acquiring new cores from the pool or releasing unneeded cores back to the pool for use by other processes.

In addition to the PS3, IBM and Sony plan to develop content-creation workstations, with prototypes appearing in 4Q 2004. IBM will handle the hardware end, while Sony will provide the operating system and data architecture for the systems. Along with being used to develop games for the PS3, the workstations will also be aimed at the digital content creation market (e.g., films).

IBM has its hands in a number of cookie jars at the moment — they will be supplying the CPU for the next-generation Xbox, which will be in direct competition with the PS3 once they both ship. Also, their PowerPC 970 CPUs power Apple's professional desktop line, which is targeted at the some of the same markets the Cell workstation will be. It is beginning to look as though Intel will be shut out of the console gaming market altogether, and while Intel CPUs (running both variations of Windows and Linux) will continue to be a presence in digital content creation and PC gaming, the IBM/Sony workstations (as well as the Power Macintosh G5 and AMD-powered systems) will put the squeeze on them.